The air was cool and free of cigarette smoke, which Dolan corrected for as soon as he sat down. I didn't bother to complain. Stacey's pipe tobacco and Dolan's cigarette smoke masked the faint whiff of noxious gases from the excavation site outside. Dolan helped himself to a handful of nuts, popping them in his mouth one by one while he looked at me. "What'd you get?"

"You're not going to like it." I went on with a summary of my travels, starting with Cloris Bargo and the lie she'd told.

Stacey said, "I talked to her twice myself and she never said a word about that."

"It's my charm and finesse."

"Well, shit. I didn't realize she was married to Joe Mandel. He worked with us on this."

"I know. I remembered the name."

Dolan said, "I can't believe she was blowing smoke up our skirts. She actually admitted that?"

"Well, yeah. She said at the time she couldn't see the harm."

Stacey said, "Let's leave that one alone. No sense butting into their business. I tell you what we might do though is ask Joe if he could locate Jane Doe's effects for us. It'd be good to take a look. Might spark an idea. I'll make a call and clear it with the sheriff. Don't think he'd object, but you never know about these things." He made a note to himself and turned back to me. "What else?"

"After I left her, I drove on up to Lompoc, stopping off at Gull Cove, which is closed, by the way." I laid out my conversation with Roxanne Faught, what she'd said, and where the story she'd told me varied from what we knew. I gave them copies of the news clippings to demonstrate my point. "I think she lifted the details from these, which means we can't rely on her. I believe she encountered someone, but it wasn't necessarily our Jane Doe."

"Too bad. It sounds like a dead end," Dolan said.

Stacey said, "Dead ends are a given. That's how these things go.

We're bound to run into a few along the way. All that tells us is to back up and look somewhere else. Lucky we found out about it now before we wasted any more time on it."

"Knocks our hitchhiking theory all to hell," Dolan said.

"Maybe so, maybe not. She could have gone to Lompoc by train or bus and hitched a ride from there."

I said to Dolan, "What about the vehicles seen in the area? Any way to check those out?"

"Johanson said something about a hippie van. We could track down that guy – what's his name..."

"Vogel."

"Right, him. Why don't we see what he remembers."

"It's a long shot," I said.

"So's everything else we've come up with so far."